The image collections and data cube collections produced in the Brazil Data Cube (BDC) project can be discovered and accessed through a standardized API known as SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog (STAC).

The SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog (STAC) is a specification created from several organizations collaborating to improve the interoperable search for satellite imagery.

Figure 1 contains the most important concepts behind the STAC model: Catalog, Collection, Item and Asset.

API STAC

The STAC API is a dynamic version of a STAC. It returns STAC Catalog, Collection, Item, ItemCollection objects through various endpoints.

The description of the concepts below is adapted from the STAC Specification:

Catalog:

A catalog provides a structure to link several STAC Items together or even to other STAC Catalogs or Collections.

Collection:

A collection is a specialization of a Catalog that allows the addition of information about a given collection of Spatio-temporal data.

Asset:

A spatiotemporal asset is any file that represents information from Earth, captured in one space and time.

Item:

A STAC Item is an atomic unit of metadata in STAC, providing links to the assets (including thumbnails) that they represent. It is a GeoJSON resource with additional fields such as time, links to related entities, and especially assets. According to the specification, it is an atomic unit that describes the data to be discovered in an STAC Catalog or Collection.

URL STAC Brazil Data Cube

https://data.inpe.br/bdc/stac/v1/

Clients:

The facilities provided by the STAC service can be used in any programming language that supports network communication via HTTP requests. This means that all modern languages can access the service’s operations.

In addition to specifying and implementing the STAC reference service, BDC also provides a client in the R programming language. The service can also be accessed using the official Python client library pystac-client.

PySTAC-Client – Client Python: https://pystac-client.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Rstac – Client R: https://github.com/brazil-data-cube/rstac

Zaglia, M.; Vinhas, L.; Queiroz, G. R.; Simões, R. Catalogação de Metadados do Cubo de Dados do Brasil com o SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog. In: Proceedings XX GEOINFO, November 11-13, 2019, São José dos Campos, SP, Brazil. p 280-285.

Previous documentation: https://brazil-data-cube.github.io/applications/stac.html